Another session of the Utah State Legislature has come to a close.

Senators and representatives wrapped up business at midnight Wednesday. Looking back, it was 45 days marked with some good achievements interspersed with mean-spirited and self-serving behavior.

Attempts at reforming Utah's antiquated tax structure died on the last night. Days before, it looked like both sides had worked out a compromise to create a fairer, flatter tax and reduce the food sales tax. Unfortunately, the deal went out the window Wednesday night, tossed by legislators who thought Huntsman was pushing them too hard to do his will. They put the bill on hold and let it die when the session adjourned.

Huntsman said he will call the Legislature back in May to straighten it out. Maybe if the Legislature did not have more than 700 bills to sift through, it could have worked out all the bugs in the tax reform package before the session ended.

On the bright side, Utah's open records law came out of the session little modification. When the session started, it had appeared that legislators had declared open season on the Government Records Access and Management Act. Sen. Dave Thomas, R-South Weber, and Rep. Douglas Aagard, R-Kaysville, were leading the charge with bills that would have blocked public access to government e-mail and changing the way people could appeal denials of records.

Other anti-GRAMA bills attempted to declare minor's names protected data, make the voter registration information on judges private records, allow government to charge high prices for public documents and deny records requests by claiming the information is available somewhere else.

One Utah County senator, Eagle Mountain Republican Mark Madsen, jumped in the fray with a proposal to declare inspection reports private unless the government issued a citation for a violation. Madsen claimed the bill was necessary because a business could be ruined if such reports were publicized.

Fortunately, the Legislature didn't buy the arguments and instead listened to open-government advocates' arguments that the public has a right to documents unless the state can show a compelling reason not to disclose them. For now, GRAMA will continue to allow the public to keep better tabs on government, as it has for the past 14 years.

There were also a couple bills introduced that actually strengthened the public's oversight of government.

House Bill 14, sponsored by West Jordan Republican Wayne A. Harper, strengthens the Open and Public Meetings Act by classifying workshop meetings as open meetings under the law and requiring tape recordings of all closed-door meetings. The latter provision addresses a legislative audit that found some school boards did not keep detailed minutes of closed-door meetings, making it impossible to determine if the gatherings were legal.

The bill will ensure that government entities cannot block the public from attending a meeting by declaring it a workshop, as well as give the public the documentation needed to challenge a meeting closure.

Rep. Craig Frank's bill, House Bill 188, requires government employees who handle government records receive training in GRAMA's provisions. The Pleasant Grove Republican's bill would make the chief administrative officer of a governmental entity (city manager or school superintendent, for example) responsible for seeing that the training takes place.

Utah Valley State College also fared well, getting $50 million for its Digital Learning Center and an extension of the Mountainland Applied Technology Center. While it does not cover the full construction cost of the buildings, the money will allow UVSC to upgrade its library to meet the needs of an ever-expanding student body.

The Legislature also corrected one if its worst mistakes on transportation funding this year. House Bill 112 directs the state to put nearly half of the state sales tax generated by car and car-related products into transportation funds. The bill was sponsored by Rep. Rebecca Lockhart, R-Provo, who also sponsored the original Transportation Investment Fund legislation last year that called for the tax to go to transportation.

The first deposit into the Centennial Highway Fund will be $149.6 million, and the money will then go to the TIF once the Centennial fund's obligations are fulfilled.

As anyone who travels on Interstate 15 knows, Utah's road system is nearing, if not already in, a crisis. Lockhart's legislation creates the funding mechanism that will help solve the problem.

Sen. D. Chris Buttars, R-West Jordan, and Rep. Aaron Tilton, R-Springville, failed in their attempt to over regulate school administrators when it comes to student clubs.

Buttars's bill made it through the Senate amid heated debate and claims that gay-straight clubs like the one at Provo High School were recruiting students to be gay, but it died in the House.

This was not Buttars's first attempt at a "message" bill this year. He also failed to get creationism into the curriculum.

The House killed Buttars's bill by a substantial margin.

This year seemed like the year that lobbyist reform would be passed. House Majority Leader Jeff Alexander's bill requiring legislators to report any gift worth more than $5 cleared the House, itself an incredible achievement for an ethics bill.

However, the Senate amended the bill to first set the reporting trigger at $100, and later lowered it back to the current $50 level. Sen. Howard A. Stephenson, R-Draper and the sponsor of the amendments, said the lobbyist gifts and dinners ease the sacrifice lawmakers make to serve on Capitol Hill, and that it is only the media that is painting legislators as dishonest for accepting the swag.

Stephenson also had the distinction of having a bill vetoed during the session. Senate Bill 70 would have allowed the Legislature to override the governor's rejection of a waste-dump permit application. Retaining the governor's existing authority to reject waste dumps is a necessary protection for Utahns.

We can only hope that the Legislature will reflect on this session and strive to do better next time.